Numerous types of handheld electronic devices are known. Examples of such handheld electronic devices include, for instance, personal data assistants (PDAs), handheld computers, two-way pagers, cellular telephones, and the like. Such handheld electronic devices are generally intended to be portable, and thus are relatively small. Many handheld electronic devices also feature wireless communication capability, although many such handheld electronic devices are stand-alone devices that are functional without communication with other devices. With advances in technology, handheld electronic devices are being configured to include greater numbers of features while having relatively smaller form factors.
Electronic devices, including handheld electronic devices, are capable of numerous types of communication. One type of communication is “messaging”, and one type of messaging is “instant messaging” which enables a first device to send a message to a second device. Many instant messaging services, both public and private, are available today. With most all instant messaging services, a given electronic device is provided with an interface that identifies various other electronic devices with which the given electronic device can communicate. If one of the other electronic devices has been logged out of the instant messaging service or has been switched off, the interface typically will identify the “presence” of such electronic device as being “unavailable”. Otherwise, the other electronic devices are listed as having a “presence” of “available” unless a user of one of the other electronic devices has manually changed his or her presence to a different setting, such as “out to lunch”. While instant messaging protocols and devices using the protocols have been generally effective for their intended purposes, such instant messaging protocols and devices have not been without limitation.
Generally, all instant messaging services employ protocols that were written for desktop devices, i.e., devices that generally are not portable. In an environment that includes handheld electronic devices, i.e., devices that are portable and generally remain switched on, the old protocol presence designations of “available” and “unavailable” are imprecise since such a handheld electronic device is nearly always listed as “available”, even late at night when a user clearly is not available, say, for instant messaging. Such an imprecise indication of a user's availability is generally undesirable in a messaging environment since it is generally desired that a recipient of a message be available to read and respond to the message. The communication of messages to an unavailable user wastes the time of the sender of the messages and also wastes communication bandwidth. It thus would be desirable to provide an improved method and apparatus for providing more accurate information regarding the availability of a user of a handheld electronic device in a messaging environment. Such an improved method and apparatus desirably might be capable of use with existing instant messaging services.